Blog Comments & Posts

Great write up Tom!Rapgenius's content strategy is bar-none one of the most original and rich that I've seen. Between co-branding, the map feature, the extensive amount of UGC, and Verified artist profile pages, I can definitely see why Andreesen Horowitz made the investment. They've put the user's experience first, made it simple, and provided a one-stop shop of Rap/Hip-Hop knowledge -- all built on the back of an extensive library of lyrics. Amazing how taking a simple concept like song lyrics turned into an awesome website that offers so much more.Hope they take you up on the offer!

This makes sense in the grand scheme of things. Running a quick query: "backlink analysis" + "Open Site Explorer" yields 103k results. I'm curious to see how many of these results have links back to OSE.org.

A move away from anchor text as anything more than a good/bad "neighborhood" checker makes some sense. If this is actually going to/already coming true, making content for users, not search engines is more important than ever. If it's shared enough, talked about enough, written about enough, active links to the actual page with exact anchor text lose their relevance.

There will always be ways to game Google, as we've seen with the recent posts by Dan Petrovic on Dejanseo.com. It's a cat and mouse game that some SEOs enjoy. I mean, who doesn't like finding new, novel tactics and strategies? The problem is that these tactics and strategies aren't sustainable. That's why I'm personally pumped for these kind of paradigm shifts. We now have to consider non-linked text. Context matters now more than ever if this indeed is true. PR and Reputation Management campaigns may now have a huge influence over rankings where anchor text once held a tight grasp. (Apologies for the dramatization)

On a sidenote, I'm glad to see that a lot of the stuff that Mike King and Wil Reynolds talk about, doing #RLS, is coming true. We're now much more than SEOs, we're becoming, or as Rand illustrates, we have have already become Inbound Marketers (apologies for all of the buzzwords). We now have to actively integrate ourselves not only into web design/web development and content writing, but also into branding, PR and reputation management, traditional media channels, etc.